Skip to content

Dec 2

13 Comments

Membership or Connection?

On Sunday I sat next to a friend of mine in church.  She’s a young adult (late twenties, perhaps) and extremely active in the congregation.  She volunteers in the church school, sits on committees, volunteers for different events and pledges money.  And she’s not a “member” of the church.  She said to me, “I don’t know what difference it makes to have my name on a piece of paper – how much more committed could I be?”

She also attends a UCC church on Sunday evenings.  The two services bookend her week in a powerful way that she would not want to give up.  They connect her to meaning and community and give her space for spiritual reflection. Read more

Oct 10

What Good is Expertise?

In one of my recent posts I talked about how offering expertise may not be the most helpful strategy of leadership.  So what use is expertise at all then, many of you asked me (with not a little frustration!)  It’s a good question, and I’ve been stewing on it for weeks.

The recent reflections about the life of Steve Jobs have given me some perspective. Jobs certainly never eschewed expertise.  He didn’t wait for people to tell him what they were looking for to make their lives easier.  As many have said, he decided what would be helpful and then marketed it to convince people how much they needed it.  But, and this is a big but, he used his expertise to create something new that people could then participate in co-creating.  The whole concept of open-sourcing apps has engaged people in a common enterprise that is not pre-determined.  Apple didn’t tell people the kinds of apps they could develop – they created a platform on which infinite ideas could be explored. Read more

Sep 23

8 Comments

The Decline of American congregations or the Rebirth of American Religiosity?

Hartford Seminary recently released a report on the changing nature of congregational life in America.  The FACT (Faith Communities Today) report outlines the findings of a ten-year study (2000 – 2010) that includes data collected from over 11,000 congregations in 120 denominations (Christian, Jewish and Muslim).

The tone of the report is decidedly gloomy: fewer people are attending congregations across denominations, despite efforts to revivify worship with contemporary music and social media connectivity.  With the exception of the tiny slice of mega-churches, congregations are becoming smaller and smaller, and more report that they seem outmoded and irrelevant to modern life. Read more

Sep 8

9 Comments

The Pendulum is Swinging

I have recently become aware of a cultural pendulum swinging in Unitarian Universalist culture.

Ministers like me who have been around at least twenty years were strongly schooled in the notion that we needed to bring order out of chaos.  Our highly egalitarian and inclusive cultures growing out of the “anything goes” culture of the 60’s and 70’s had created a situation in which it often felt like we were just chasing our tails and not able to make progress (or even decisions!)  Remember all the jokes about herding cats?  What was needed, we believed, was an ability to structure our work with appropriate authority and definitiveness. Read more

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →